This morning, I hosted Perdet Goluboi Bliad, a decidedly nervous gentleman who holds the post of American Tourism Specialist at the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan here in Washington. I know he was decidedly nervous because he told me.
“Mr. Collins,” he confessed by way of opening our consultation, “I am today decidedly nervous.”
“Given the current circumstances,” I observed, “who could blame you?”
“Indeed, and not without good reason,” he concurred while compulsively rubbing his hands together, “because, you see, I have the distinct misfortune of being related to President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.”
“Who may not,” I commented, “be President much longer.”
“He is President in name only,” Bliad sighed.
“Has anyone,” I discreetly inquired, “ever mentioned that you look and sound exactly like Peter Lorre?”
Bliad turned his huge, watery eyes toward me in total mystification. “And who, pray tell, is he?”
“Oh, never mind,” I replied with a smile. “Care for a drink?”
“Yes, yes,” my guest murmured, rubbing his hands together a bit faster, “that would be splendid. Single malt scotch?”
“McCallan eighteen okay?” I asked.
“Quite okay,” he nodded vigorously in anticipation.
“How would you like it?” I asked.
“Neat,” Bliad told me, “in a brandy snifter.”
And that’s what he got. I had mine on the rocks – Evian ice cubes.
“So,” I continued, gazing out the picture window at the White House, “let’s look at the facts. Kyrgyzstan is a world class contender in the corruption and nepotism Olympics…”
“We are less corrupt, Mr. Collins,” he interjected with just a hint of pique, “than Venezuela, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Chad, Iraq, Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Somalia.”
“True,” I agreed, “and no doubt Kurmanbek Bakiyev smells better than a dead goat dredged up from the sewers of old Bishkek.”
“Uh, now that you mention it,” Bliad responded in a disconsolate tone, “not really.”
“My sympathies, then,” I consoled. “It must be very difficult to be related to someone like that.”
“His body odor,” Bliad clarified, “is hardly the worst aspect. In fact, compared to his manners, his avarice, his dishonesty and his foul temper, he smells… how do you Americans say it? Ah, yes, I remember… he smells like a [expletive] rose.”
“And what a pity,” I remarked, “that he stole the Presidency, repressed the populace, murdered his opposition, commanded the slaughter of protesters, looted the treasury and fled to the south. And it seems that now, his antics have placed Kyrgyzstan on the brink of civil war.”
“Quite correct,” my client vouched, proffering an empty snifter. “Refill?”
“Of course,” I replied as I quickly complied, handing him another shot of the only single malt scotch which is still exclusively aged in sherry barrels. Not that there’s anything wrong with Kentucky bourbon oak, but still, what other scotch tastes like scotch did before the American Revolution? “And what do you think would happen, if a civil war split the country into North Kyrgyzstan and South Kyrgyzstan?”
“I am reminded,” he almost whispered, “of when I first arrived here in Washington to work at the embassy. My third night here, I met a college student in a bar on M Street.”
“Just a short walk down Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown,” I noted, “from the embassy. You went out for happy hour, maybe?”
“I certainly did,” he nodded, staring morosely down at the floor. “And I was reasonably happy when she accompanied me back to my apartment, too. Then she asked where I was from, and I pointed out Kyrgyzstan on a map of the world I had strategically placed in the living room to emphasize to visitors that I am an international diplomat. ‘That little tiny piece of [expletive] hanging out of Kazakstan’s [expletive]?’ she said, ‘that’s where you’re [expletive] from?’ I was so humiliated,” he choked. “Especially because I knew what she had blurted out was, well… accurate, anyway. For the last five thousand years, Kyrgyzstan has been a tiny little piece of [expletive] hanging out of this or that kingdom’s, empire’s or country’s [expletive]. And the last thing Kyrgyzstan needs now is to become two little pieces of [expletive] hanging out of China’s [expletive] and Kazakstan’s [expletive]. We’d become a laughingstock,” he moaned, “lower than Tajikistan. But [expletive] that,” Bliad suddenly blustered, “because I can’t ever go back there again, anyway. So what do I care if my pathetic, impoverished, benighted home country splits up to become two even more pathetic, even more impoverished, even more benighted little pieces of [expletive], anyway?”
“What makes you think,” I pressed, “that you can’t go back?”
“Mr. Collins,” he assured me with an unassailable air of conviction, “if I go back to Kyrgyzstan, I am a dead man.”
“Because of your relationship to President Bakiyev?”
“Exactly,” he confidently affirmed. “While interim President Roza Otunbayeva has guaranteed the safety of Bakiyev himself, no such promises for his relatives have been forthcoming.”
“And therefore,” I concluded, “you need to… shall we say… formulate an alternative strategy.”
“Indubitably,” Bliad acknowledged. “Refill?”
“In that case,” I suggested as I poured him another shot, “you have two basic choices. First, you could take off to some other country…”
“Although I have managed to… raise some funds,” he broke in, “it is, I am afraid, not feasible for me to do that. I simply can’t afford it.”
“Okay then,” I advised, “in that case, I recommend you do what a certain Rwandan diplomat did back in the nineties.”
“Who,” he queried, his eyebrows doing a little dance of wonder, “might that have been?”
“One Jean Damascene Bizimana,” I elaborated. “He was the Rwandan ambassador to the United Nations back in 1994. When the genocide boiled over and it was obvious he could never return to his home country, he simply disappeared.”
“But you,” Bliad presumed, “know where he is?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, “I do. He fled to Opelika, Alabama, and assumed a new identity as an African-American. Nobody even noticed.”
Bliad polished off his third shot of single malt scotch, then contemplated the ceiling, slowly stroking his chin. “I am, in fact, trained as an electrician. So where, in the names of the Forty Tribes,” he mused, “could someone such as myself go to live in America and never be found?”
“A Kyrgyz who’s a dead ringer for Peter Lorre and knows household wiring?” I asked, rhetorically, of course. “I’d recommend Louisiana.”
“Louisiana?” He shot me a puzzled expression. “Why?”
“Because in Louisiana,” I explained, “they have drive-thru frozen daiquiri bars.”
“So?”
“So nobody in Louisiana is going to be sober enough, long enough to notice you’re not from around thereabouts no-how.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah,” I assured him. “And what’s even better, there ain’t more than a dozen people in the state of Louisiana what knows that Kyrgyzstan even exists!”
Now let’s see what’s in that old Quarterly Mailbag:
A whole slew of folks wrote in to share their Blizzard of 2010 adventures. These usually began with inspiring accounts of sudden community and altruism, the sort which warm the heart to the temperature of well-served saki. And if one lived, as I do, in a spacious suburb or, as my friend in the Web log post does, out in the great American countryside we have here in the Mid-Atlantic Region, those feelings apparently endured for the entire crisis. If one lived in some place like Arlington, or a residential neighborhood in the District of Columbia, however, it seems that, once people had shoveled out their cars, the issue of maintaining their hard-won parking places completely overcame any perceived survival advantage that might have proceeded from bonding with their neighbors. As uplifting as the tales of candle-lit pot-luck dinners with the folks on the block and such may have been, I must confess I found the snowstorm parking war stories to be much more enthralling. Which goes to show, I guess, why any novel worth reading or any play worth watching is always much more concerned with conflict and confrontation than harmony and cooperation. As the only Chinese curse so aptly puts it, “may you live in interesting times.”
The post about my second call (as all regular readers of this Web log know) from a person who really lives in Toledo, Ohio, really is a plumber and is really named Joe concerning that motor-mouth mountebank, Sam Wurzelbacher, who, as we all know, isn’t even really a plumber, much less from Toledo, or named Joe, drew plenty of commentary from all points of the political spectrum. I was a bit disappointed, however, to find that no one had much to say about how much grief Wurzelbacher has cause my brother-in-law’s cousin Joe. All they wanted to tell me was how right or wrong the fake Joe the Plumber is about things like health care, international relations and macro-economics. Am I out of line here if I observe that those are hardly the subjects upon which plumbers are generally considered credible experts? As far as I’m concerned, the people who take Joe the Plumber’s opinions about such matters seriously might as well be seeking advice from actors, musicians, or professional athletes, who are, after all, the traditional sources of completely ignorant, half-baked public political opinions. And speaking of opinions, it seems that, while everybody has one about Joe the Plumber, nobody, apparently, cares to commiserate, even for a moment, with the numerous and undeserved travails this clown has caused all the genunine plumbers named Joe. Such is life, I suppose.
My February 21 post about corporations and schools using the cameras and software in their organizationally-issued lap top computer to spy on their employees and students drew the expected avalanche of responses from libertarians and people who belong to the ACLU. What found quite unexpected, though, was that both sorts, strangely enough, were so strangely similar in content. For example, references to the “Constitutional right to privacy” came several times from both sources. Now, how whack is that? Maybe libertarians and the ACLU can’t agree on lunch, but they both definitely agree having your boss or principal watching you undress in your bedroom is wrong, wrong, wrong. I regret to inform both camps, however, that there is, in fact, nothing in the Constitution about a right to privacy. My guess on that issue is that the Framers lived in a society so genteel and civilized that the idea of authorities of any kind, even King George III, engaging in what amounts depraved voyeurism simply never occurred to them – the entire concept was completely beyond the Pale; one might as well expect there to have been something in the Constitution about the sovereignty of United States air space. Nevertheless, of course, with respect to a right of privacy, it must be noted that later constitutional scholars, notably Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, found some penumbras of it here and there in the Constitution, which, as we know, is “a space of partial illumination lying between a perfect shadow on all sides and the full light.” What optics has to do with privacy, of course, would not become evident until many years after Douglas found those penumbras, but the advent of the lap top mini-camera and its subsequent abuse by despicable managers and education officials finally brought the situation full circle. Thanks, Bill.
The transcript of my conversation with Dr. Sharmoot bin Ssum-izi al Humar-Hasawee, Cultural Subject Matter Expert at the The People’s Bureau of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriy regarding Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi’s son Hannibal, attracted rather more nasty comments about Arabs than I would consider proper, even from an American public so recently outraged by Mohammed al-Madadi’s tasteless attempts at humor while riding on a United Airlines flight. For those readers, perhaps mostly those outside the US, who don’t know about the incident, Mr. al-Madadi was flying from Washington to Denver in order to meet with a Qatari citizen being held there, accused of being a member of Al Qaida – you know, Osama bin Laden’s little circle-jerk club. Caught smoking in the rest room (smoking is strictly forbidden on US commercial aircraft) al-Madadi cracked a joke about how no, he wasn’t in there puffing on a cigarette, he was in there trying to light his shoes on fire (à la Richard Reed, the “Shoe Bomber”), but they wouldn’t ignite since they were all wet because before he went in there, some American had urinated all over the floor. Some diplomat – it looks like maybe al-Madadi has been studying the work of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But be that as it may, the sort of thoughts some of my readers are having about Arabs these days are simply unprintable. Arabs are nice people, okay? Please don’t let a few bad apples like Mohammed al-Madadi, Osama bin Laden, or Hannibal Gaddafi get you all prejudiced and stuff, because nobody loves a hater.
And speaking of hate, the next post’s title, “World Astonished as Republicans Caught Using Fear and Hate,” generated plenty of hate mail for Tom Collins. According to the latest count, as matter of fact, there are over a thousand conservative Republicans who officially hate my guts. All that over a post where I did little more than relate a family supper conversation! Is it my fault, or, for that matter, my relatives’ fault, that Rob Bickhart is a moron? And isn’t a little political debate good for the digestion? GZPZ, Republican respondents, lighten up, okay? Did somebody hold a gun to Bickhart’s head and force him to depict House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as Cruella DeVille and President Obama as the Joker? No, that was his own bright idea, wasn’t it? Anyway, thanks to the sixty-three folks who wrote in to say they tried one or more of the shad roe recipes I mentioned in that post and that they proved delicious. To them, I would say, if you liked the one where the roe is wrapped in shad fillet, try shad roe wrapped in flounder or catfish fillets, or stuffed in a filleted trout. Seasoning schemes include chives, herbes de Provence, chervil, dill, and, of course, Old Bay. Marinate the filets and roe sacs in lemon juice and spring water for thirty minutes and place butter pats on the fish and roe rolls before you put them in the oven at 350 Fahrenheit for an hour. Goat butter’s particularly good with shad roe, BTW. Yum – what a shame all that stuff is obviously too effete, intellectual, liberal and sophisticated for conservative Republicans to enjoy. Oh, well, that’s just more for me, then, I figure.
Not that the next post, on March 13, didn’t generate a Niagara of e-mails from extreme left-wing Democrats, nearly all of whom denounced me as a reactionary ditto-head for what I wrote about White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. To them I say, why don’t you try reading more than one post on my Web log before you jump to your inevitable knee-jerk conclusions, you pathetic pinkos? News flash, dearies – the Soviet Union collapsed nineteen years ago, so stop dressing your ankle-biters in red diapers, okay? And to those of you who wrote in about the phrase “a baby’s arm holding an apple,” it did not, in fact originate with the lyrics of The Tubes’ “What Do You Want From Life?” It originated with Lenny Bruce – or, more accurately, with his Aunt Memma. So, for all of you who wrote in wanting to know what the hell it is, I suggest you read all about it in Lenny’s autobiography “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.”
Boy howdy, did a lot of folks light up a fire under my behind about my post concerning a certain meeting I had with a Democratic House Whip’s staffer at the Willard Hotel Round Robin Bar. In fact, that post, with its mention of me receiving an envelope of hundred dollar bills under the table, actually prompted several responses outside of cyberspace – irate conservative Republicans, angry Tea Party loons and even some right-wing career dorks from the Justice Department have, the bartenders tell me, been coming to the Round Robin looking for a Tom Collins – after which they find out that, at the Round Robin, they cost eleven dollars, plus ten percent DC restaurant and bar tax. And, I have also been told, every single one of those bozos tried to refuse payment when their drinks were served; plus, when, after being reminded of the local ordinances, they forked over the money, every one of them stiffed the bartender! My apologies to the staff at the Round Robin. Good thing I’m a very generous tipper. But many thanks to the droves of DEVO fans who wrote in about the post, though. They, at least, understood why it’s entitled “Are We Not Legislators?”
“Washington Foot-in-Mouth Disease Epidemic Continues Unabated,” which appeared on March 26, elicited a torrent of carefully worded, mostly polite, but still obviously upset responses from folks who think I was mean to poor Joe Biden. He’s a good man, they reminded me, a one with the common touch, and a heart as big as the mouth of the Delaware River – or, I might observe, his own. And if a man has a heart as big as his mouth, then the bigger the better, I say. But I sincerely believe that anyone who reads that post objectively will see that I like and respect Joe Biden, even if he’s, well, so obviously vice-presidential timber. And to those who maintain I have been unfair to him, I would say, just remember this – no matter what bone-headed malapropisms Joe Biden produces, he will never surpass Dan Quayle. After all, who can forget “Welcome President Bush, Mrs. Bush and my fellow astronauts,” “We are going to have the best educated American people in the world,” “I am not part of the problem, I am a Republican,” “I stand by all the misstatements I’ve made,” or any of the other examples of Dan Quayle’s wit and wisdom, all of which are now immortalized on the Internet, and which can be readily found in mere seconds with our favorite search engines? No, Joe, it just ain’t so. For we, the American people, we know gaffes. We have heard Dan Quayle’s gaffes, and we have heard yours; and you, Joe Biden, are no Dan Quayle.